In the first twelve days of April, 76 United States troops died in combat in Iraq, making it already the worst month for deaths in action since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime a year ago. Iraqi casualties are believed to be more than 700, with deep controversy over the number of civilians killed and injured.
In Fallujah, local doctors say that about 700 people were killed there alone, most of them civilians. International relief groups put the number at 470, with 1,200 people injured. Those wounded include 243 women and 200 children, giving strong support to the belief that many of those killed were indeed civilians, as shown also by Jo Wildings remarkable testimony published on openDemocracy.
While a tenuous ceasefire was negotiated in Fallujah at the weekend, and some Shia militias withdrew from areas they occupied, the attitude of the US military leadership has remained aggressive, including a determination to control Fallujah by force if a negotiated conclusion to the conflict fails. Even more robust is the stated intention to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr.
Since the two-front fighting developed two weeks ago, against Sunni militia in Fallujah, Ramadi and Baghdad, and against Shia militia in Baghdad and across a number of southern cities, copious analysis in the western press has focussed on what are now a number of received wisdoms. These include the view that closing al-Sadrs newspaper and detaining one of his deputies was a grave error, given the extent of the militia support he had quietly built up. With the poor economic status and high unemployment of the majority Shia communities across Iraq, it was all too easy for these actions to provide a focus for revolt.
Other mistakes include the excessive use of force in Fallujah, even in the light of the previous killing and mutilation of four US private security personnel. Once again, the effect is seen to have been to harden the opposition to occupation.
More generally, commentators have focussed on the failure to spread the limited rewards of economic growth across Iraqi society, an excessive concern with privatisation and the award of lucrative contracts to US contractors, the disbanding of the Iraqi army last summer and the detention without trial of around ten thousand Iraqis.
The larger picture
While all of this may make sense, it is probably more productive to analyse the events of the past two weeks in a wider context, taking in not just the developments in Iraq but also what has happened elsewhere in the region, extending through to Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as the continuing activism of al-Qaida and its associates.
Since the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime, this series of articles has tried to piece together both the longer-term trends in Bushs war on terror and the consequences of US policy towards Iraq and Israel. In doing so, what might be put forward as realistic analysis has, on occasions, seemed excessively pessimistic. Even at times of apparent progress, it has concluded that substantial problems lie ahead.
Are we now entering a period when such an analysis is proving valid? Perhaps the most helpful approach is to go back six weeks, assess how the situation looked to the coalition at that time and then see how circumstances have changed.
At the end of February there was a prospect that the United States would be able to hand over to an appointed client regime in Baghdad by the middle of the year. Violence certainly continued, but substantial effort was being put into building up the Iraqi police, the Civil Defence Force, numerous pipe-line and other security organisations, and a new Iraqi army. In addition, many thousands of private security personnel, drawn from scores of countries, were operating in Iraq, and the CPA had privatised many of the functions previously undertaken by the military, right down to the running of supply convoys.
Coalition officials could point to the re-opening of schools, rising oil production and slowly improving electricity supplies all signs that the Iraqi economy was now developing as a serious entity, in spite of the problems in the months immediately after the fall of the old regime. Moreover, when local elections did take place, it was common for secular politicians to get elected, suggesting that fears of a nascent Islamic radicalism were far from the truth.
It is true that the Pentagon recognised the likelihood of a continuing insurgency and was planning for the possibility of 100,000 troops remaining in the country for up to three years. It was also establishing a network of permanent bases to ensure the long-term security for the United States of this extraordinarily oil-rich country. There were problems ahead, but prospects looked reasonable. At least it was possible that Iraq would not blow up during the US presidential election campaign, that being the dominant political requirement in Washington.
If anything, the concern in US military circles was more with Afghanistan and the persistence there of a Taliban and al-Qaida threat. As a result, the US military in Afghanistan was reinforced and the Musharraf government in Pakistan was persuaded to participate in a major trans-border military operation. Pakistani army troops would move into those parts of the North-West Frontier Province that harboured Taliban and other militias, producing an anvil against which a US military hammer would pound these groups from the Afghanistan side of the border.
The aim was to destroy Taliban and al-Qaida elements in their supposed last refuge, with a real chance of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden himself. This would further cripple al-Qaida at a time when it was demonstrating a diminishing capability in the wake of the already receding attacks in Istanbul the previous year.
A strategy in trouble
Look, now, at what has happened in the last six weeks. In Afghanistan, instability continues and the Karzai administration can still not get the support it needs to aid the rebuilding of the country. Warlords remain rampant and Taliban elements have influence across a substantial part of the country. In Pakistan, the army has faced much greater difficulty than anticipated, so much so that results of the first military operations, conducted during March, were minimal.
Meanwhile, a paramilitary group that was at least loosely associated with al-Qaida carried out a devastating attack in Madrid, killing over 190 people and injuring well over 1,000. Warnings of further attacks are a regular feature of the European scene, with multiple arrests in Britain and unprecedented security in Italy. A further issue that has almost been forgotten in western circles is the longer-term impact of the Israeli assassination of the Hamas leader, Sheikh Yassin.
Then there is Iraq, where the security predicament for the United States is potentially more difficult than even the most robust analysis currently indicates. This stems from four factors.
The first is that recent events, especially in Fallujah, have begun to lead to a more general increase in opposition to US occupation that is beginning to take on the form of a new Iraqi nationalism. This is in its early stages, many parts of Iraq remain peaceful and possibly most Iraqis still offer some support to the United States. But current US approaches, with the intent to maintain rigorous control, are highly likely to fuel this nationalism, not diminish it.
Second, the insurgents have become more confident and are demonstrating a greater sophistication in their actions as well as an unexpected degree of coordination. They are proving particularly effective at disrupting supply routes, with frequent attacks on convoys as well as the destruction of bridges. In one sign of their capabilities, insurgents have spotted changes in convoy routes where the US forces are seeking to avoid dangerous roads, and are promptly destroying bridges on those alternate routes.
Third, much of the US policy for stabilising Iraq has depended on the domestication of security replacing US occupying troops with police, paramilitary forces and the new Iraqi army. This is simply not working. The Iraqi police have lost hundreds of their people to the insurgency in the past year and most are in no mood to lay down their lives at a time of perceived American belligerence. Even more significant has been the refusal of a newly formed and trained battalion of the Iraqi army to support US operations in Fallujah.
What this means is that a fundamental part of the US security policy in Iraq has come apart at the seams, leaving the entire policy in disarray. It is probably the most significant development of the past six weeks and explains the request to Washington from the US military in Iraq for two extra brigades of at least 10,000 combat troops.
What has to be remembered is that a large proportion of the US troops in Iraq are reservists working on a wide range of projects. The core group of perhaps 80,000 combat troops is far too small to secure Iraq even if it were aided by effective Iraqi forces, and these are simply not there.
The fourth factor is that the sudden wave of kidnappings coupled with all the other forms of insecurity means that the pace of reconstruction and economic development has slowed right down, with this likely to get even worse as companies pull out their personnel and countries urge their nationals to leave. If this problem persists, then the entire coalition timetable for Iraqi development comes unhinged.
A critical phase
The predicament of the United States in Iraq is serious, verging on the critical, and it is possible that the combination of the Fallujah violence and the Muqtada al-Sadr phenomenon will come to be seen as the turning point. Bear in mind that the coming months will see the intensely hot summer, and that this may well also see sustained attacks on oil exports and power supplies.
Beyond this, the continued reporting by al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya and other TV channels of the civilian costs of the war is leading to much higher levels of anti-Americanism across the region. Furthermore, this is on top of the effects of the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Yassin.
The end result of all of this may be that the United States position in Iraq is actually becoming unsustainable. If so, then is there any alternative that might conceivably be accepted by Washington? One proposal put forward by former senior UN diplomat Marrack Goulding and others calls for a phased US withdrawal followed by a combination of a UN-organised political transition backed by substantial peace-keeping forces provided largely by states from the Islamic world.
This might just work if the UN was prepared to take the huge risk involved, but the very fact that it is promoted by such an experienced person as Goulding illustrates how serious the situation has become.
Even now, though, it is a political non-starter in Washington. At its core, the US take-over of Iraq has always been part of a wider policy of ensuring the security of the Persian Gulf, partly in the context of US attitudes towards Israel but much more because of the politics of oil. The lynchpin of this policy is a client regime in Baghdad backed by a substantial and permanent US military presence in Iraq.
If the United States were to withdraw and hand over to the UN, this would be a defeat for its whole regional policy. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this could happen, perhaps if John Kerry is elected in November. For the present, though, the security predicament in Iraq would have to get very much worse before such a fundamental reversal of policy could be considered by the Bush administration.
